Consciousness Raising Group with Essex University lake and tower blocks (Amber Djemal, Lynne Friedli and others)
Michele Grant
I arrived at Essex University straight from my comprehensive school in Liverpool. I had no money as I was expecting to pick up a cheque with my full grant which was to cover all my needs. How lucky we were in those days, except that the cheque didn’t arrive for another week. Fortunately, I had a small appetite and scraped by on handouts from quickly acquired friends. The university was surrounded by fields which, as a city girl more at home with the sound of breaking glass than mooing cows, I found unnerving. And yet, within days, Essex University became for me the most vibrant, exciting, maelstrom of activity of people and most of all ideas.
Ideas. Nearly 50 years on I am drawn to ideas. How they emerge. The alchemy of different perspectives forged into something challenging and new. And it all started for me at Essex University.
Some credit must go to the fresh approach the university had to academic learning because although I had applied to do an English Literature degree, Essex had a different name for it: Comparative Literature and the clue is in the name. Out with F. R Leavis and the Anglo-centric ‘canon’ of works deemed worthy of inclusion in the Great Tradition. We were to study George Eliot along side Chinua Achebe. And before we could even get to that point, we were to spend a year in the School of Comparative Studies, studying Literature alongside Philosophy, History and Sociology. So yes, credit to Essex University for championing the power of applying a variety of lenses to everything we studied.
But the Essex University experience was formed by more than its approach to academic learning. And that was apparent from the first day of Freshers’ Fair. The university took a third of its students from overseas which was unusual back then, certainly for undergraduates. There was an Iranian society trading insults with the Baath Party Iraqis. Chilean refugees from Pinochet were plentiful. Just walking from stall to stall was a lesson in international relations.
And then, a third of students were mature students. Many were rejects from the grammar school system who had sought a second chance of education through FE college or access courses. That meant a far higher number of working-class students than elsewhere. Two friends I made had actually gone to grammar school but being working class were nonetheless expected to leave at 16.
Quite the mix. But with hindsight I realise that the most consequential presence for the formation of me as a feminist, and specifically a socialist feminist, was that there were women who had worked, some who had children, women who had enough life experience to feed my perspective and understanding of what feminism was for.
Essex was a small university and the campus life created an intensity that bred ideas fast. The first BIG IDEA I remember was that we wanted a Women’s Room. We campaigned for it and got it. Just a room. But so much more than that because of everything its presence conveyed and everything we did together in that space. Looking back on it the enormity of what that room represented and enabled is so much more than four walls. The idea of a space just for women really started from the idea that we needed to think separately about what was important to us, to do that thinking from our own starting points. This is not, by the way, to say that we had a separatist politics, we absolutely didn’t. We joined with men on all kinds of issues from gay liberation to racism to overseas student fees and beyond the university to hosting striking steel workers.
Being Jewish from an observant family who had come to Britain as refugees I identified strongly with students who were also not entirely culturally English. But my Jewish identity was something I mainly repressed because like most Jews I had a connection to Israel and to Zionism in the context of self-determination for both Jews and Palestinians. I have painful memories of seeing members of the Jewish Society who opposed the mantra that ‘Zionism is racism’ being chased out of a debate with shouts of ‘fascists’. I betrayed them by staying quiet. Yet it was my friend of Muslim heritage who looked after me that day. A moment I have never forgotten; a moment of sisterhood.
But back to our Women’s Room. Discussions were called consciousness-raising or CR groups. And there was so much to become actively conscious of. Health was a big one. Our Bodies Ourselves was like having an Owner’s Manual. We practiced with a speculum so we could better understand our anatomy. We took control. And we laughed. Some of us morphed from being self-conscious, freighted with the baggage of social expectations of women, to being conscious and confident in the selves we were becoming.
It was the end of the seventies and we were building on the foundations that had been set by the feminists of a few years preceding us. Feminists who gave us a lot of rights our mothers never had. But for me and many other feminists our activism was ranged across our socialist politics and our feminism and the magazine Women’s Voice was the perfect blend of these two imperatives.
The magazine had been launched by women in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1972 with this declaration:
Women’s liberation has been the subject of hundreds of books, articles, jokes and TV programmes. Much of this has made the subject seem a silly and trivial one but despite this there is no doubt that thousands of women have achieved a new awareness of their position in society and how they would like it to be changed. But in the great debate about women’s Lib one thing is hardly ever mentioned: the situation of the working-class woman. Women’s Voice is being produced to fill this gap. First and foremost it is a magazine for working class women who want to read something that tries to deal with their real life. It will cover the struggles of women for the right to work, for equal pay, against rent increases and rising prices. We will deal with the double burden of working women who are expected to do two jobs – one at work and one at home. It will be looking at the needs and interests of women as housewives and mothers. Women’s Voice will be socialist in its approach. Because the society we live in today is geared towards profit and not towards human needs we cannot radically change women’s situation in this society. Only a socialist society can begin to do this. And socialism cannot be built without women; without our struggles to change our lives as workers as mothers as wives.
It’s easy to forget the extent to which feminism was a matter for ridicule back in 1972 but by 1977 it felt like real in-roads were being made, not least because this socialist feminist approach was able to connect the dots for women – to show how women were impacted by how they were treated in the workplace as well as in their relationships. I threw myself into this. It was summed up by saying that women are subject to both oppression and exploitation: oppressed as women by patriarchy and exploited as women by capitalism. At the end of my first year at Essex I decided to make good on this commitment and take a year out to go and work on the magazine in London. And there I was thrown into an SWP maelstrom in which Women’s Voice, which by then was both a magazine and an autonomous sister organisation of the SWP, was being pressured to give up its autonomy. Women in the SWP divided into camps – those wanting to retain autonomy and those willing to relinquish it.
I returned to Essex in 1979 to carry on with my degree. Margaret Thatcher had come to power. Any frisson of delight at the first woman Prime Minister was more than overshadowed by the impact of her government. The struggle to fight exploitation and oppression continued. The national steel strike of 1980 brought striking steel workers who were picketing the nearby port of Harwich to Essex University and some of them were joined by their wives. The politics of Women’s Voice and of socialist feminism was now writ large in our student lives. It was probably the most emblematic moment of my political evolution from that time.
Forty-five years later the scorecard for socialist feminism is mixed. Much has been achieved for women but my sense is that working class women have reaped less. The very definition of woman is now contested and for some that is progressive and for others it is a new assault. To some degree I accept that my generation must pass the baton to the next. But just as I knew we were building on the foundations of those women who preceded us I hope the new feminists can do the same.
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